Morning Briefing
For August 28, 2013
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Just one post for you today. It's done on purpose. Today is an anniversary worth dwelling on. But
while so many will focus on "I Have a Dream," I think your attention is
worth focusing on "The Street Sweeper" and its enduring message. You'll need to go through to the whole post for some 21st century application.
— Erick
The Street Sweeper
August
28, 2013, is the fiftieth anniversary of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I
Have a Dream” speech. It is a very good speech. But it is not my
favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. speech. My favorite is little known and
even less remembered. It is a speech no leader in America on a stage
such as he commanded would ever think to give. It is a speech about
individuals being the best they can be as the beginning of their way in
life and finding God as the end.
King’s
“Street Sweeper” speech, which is more properly called “The Three
Dimensions of a Complete Life” was a variation of a theme he went back
and forth to over the years. He gave this particular speech to New
Covenant Baptist Church in Chicago, IL, on April 9, 1967.
It’s common title of “The Street Sweeper” speech comes from this passage:
What
I’m saying to you this morning, my friends, even if it falls your lot
to be a street sweeper, go on out and sweep streets like Michelangelo
painted pictures; sweep streets like Handel and Beethoven composed
music; sweep streets like Shakespeare wrote poetry; (Go ahead) sweep
streets so well that all the host of heaven and earth will have to pause
and say, “Here lived a great street sweeper who swept his job well.”
If you can’t be a pine on the top of a hill
Be a scrub in the valley—but be
The best little scrub on the side of the hill,
Be a bush if you can’t be a tree.
If you can’t be a highway just be a trail
If you can’t be the sun be a star;
It isn’t by size that you win or fail—
Be the best of whatever you are.
And when you do this, when you do this, you’ve mastered the length of life. (Yes)
This
onward push to the end of self-fulfillment is the end of a person’s
life. Now don’t stop here, though. You know, a lot of people get no
further in life than the length. They develop their inner powers; they
do their jobs well. But do you know, they try to live as if nobody else
lives in the world but themselves? (Yes) And they use everybody as mere
tools to get to where they’re going. (Yes) They don’t love anybody but
themselves. And the only kind of love that they really have for other
people is utilitarian love. You know, they just love people that they
can use. (Well)
A
lot of people never get beyond the first dimension of life. They use
other people as mere steps by which they can climb to their goals and
their ambitions. These people don’t work out well in life. They may go
for awhile, they may think they’re making it all right, but there is a
law. (Oh yeah) They call it the law of gravitation in the physical
universe, and it works, it’s final, it’s inexorable: whatever goes up
can come down. You shall reap what you sow. (Yeah) God has structured
the universe that way. (Yeah) And he who goes through life not concerned
about others will be a subject, victim of this law.
So
I move on and say that it is necessary to add breadth to length. Now
the breadth of life is the outward concern for the welfare of others, as
I said. (Yeah) And a man has not begun to live until he can rise above
the narrow confines of his own individual concerns to the broader
concerns of all humanity.
But
the speech begins and ends in a higher plane. King lays out three
dimensions in life. The length of life is “the inward concern for one’s
own welfare.” The breadth of life is “the outward concern for the
welfare of others. “The height of life is the upward reach for God.”
King used John’s vision of the city of God being of equal length,
breadth, and height to draw out this imagery that started his speech.
He ended his speech with a rejection of atheism. . . . please click here for the rest of the post →
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